Category: Interviews with Writers

Venita Blackburn, author of the short story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (her 2017 debut, published as a result of her Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction) visited the UA Prose Series this September. Post-reading, Suyi Okungbowa of the Sonora Review had a chat with her. Prof. Venita Blackburn is an Assistant Professor at

CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was nominated for two WGA awards for his work on HBO’s Westworld and has also written for an

What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? I’m drawn to forms animated by what Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie, or “making strange”—sometimes translated as “estrangement” or “defamiliarization.” Otherwise we are lulled to stupor and blindness by familiar narratives, gestures, humors, small talk, breakfast cereals…

ERIN ADAIR-HODGES is the winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett prize for Let’s All Die Happy (University of Pittsburgh, 2017). Winner of The Georgia Review’s Loraine Williams prize, she’s also been a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe and Sewanee-Claudia Emerson scholar and has had work featured in The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and more. She received her

What is it about the genre or cross-genre you write in that interests you/draws you in? I think there’s a sort of connection to the kinds of stories I write now and the fantasy romps I threw together when I was a teenager. I didn’t really become a reader until I started college. Poetry was